Director: Teinosuke Kinugasa
Year: 1926
Run-time: 60 min
Source: Amazon Video
In studying the history of film, we have to always keep in mind that it's the films that survived that get to tell the story. In this sense, Japanese silent films have the worst of it. Due to earthquakes and World War II (Americans destroyed an entire archive), less than 1% of Japan's films from the 1920s have survived. We've lost the first films of Ozu and Mizoguchi (we'll see plenty of both later in the list), and countless other directors or gone entirely. This makes it all the more remarkable that we can watch A Page of Madness, which the director Kinugasa reportedly found in his own storehouse in 1971.
Without the necessary context, it's difficult to know just how revolutionary this film was, but certainly it's hard to imagine it fitting well in any 1920's society. The plot centers around a man who gets a job at a mental asylum where his wife was committed, presumably after trying to murder their child. The man starts to have delusions himself, and throughout the film it's not easy to decipher what is real and what's fiction. The depiction of mental illness is always been a way for directors to break out of the norm, and the style here is extreme, with quick, angled shots and lots of double exposures. It's a disorienting film, heavy in symbolism. I'm fond of one of the final scenes, in which the man dreams that he's passing out Koi masks to the inmates, replacing their angry and confused demeanor with a calm and placid one. It's a pretty potent image that doesn't require translation.
However, I'm not sure that I would recommend A Page of Madness beyond historical interest. There's another barrier to our enjoyment of early Japanese cinema besides the paucity of extant works, and that's the format the films were originally shown in. Unlike Western cinema, silent Japanese films were always accompanied by a live narrator who would act out the dialogue and describe the action. In this way, film became something of an extension of Japanese Bunraku theatre. Seeing this film without narration is not only un-authentic, but extremely taxing, since there are no intertitles at all, and a Wikipedia synopsis can only do so much to prepare you. I have no doubt that this is a moving experience seen in its intended way, but as it stands it's just a tantalizing glimpse into a lost art scene.
Year: 1926
Run-time: 60 min
Source: Amazon Video
In studying the history of film, we have to always keep in mind that it's the films that survived that get to tell the story. In this sense, Japanese silent films have the worst of it. Due to earthquakes and World War II (Americans destroyed an entire archive), less than 1% of Japan's films from the 1920s have survived. We've lost the first films of Ozu and Mizoguchi (we'll see plenty of both later in the list), and countless other directors or gone entirely. This makes it all the more remarkable that we can watch A Page of Madness, which the director Kinugasa reportedly found in his own storehouse in 1971.
Without the necessary context, it's difficult to know just how revolutionary this film was, but certainly it's hard to imagine it fitting well in any 1920's society. The plot centers around a man who gets a job at a mental asylum where his wife was committed, presumably after trying to murder their child. The man starts to have delusions himself, and throughout the film it's not easy to decipher what is real and what's fiction. The depiction of mental illness is always been a way for directors to break out of the norm, and the style here is extreme, with quick, angled shots and lots of double exposures. It's a disorienting film, heavy in symbolism. I'm fond of one of the final scenes, in which the man dreams that he's passing out Koi masks to the inmates, replacing their angry and confused demeanor with a calm and placid one. It's a pretty potent image that doesn't require translation.
However, I'm not sure that I would recommend A Page of Madness beyond historical interest. There's another barrier to our enjoyment of early Japanese cinema besides the paucity of extant works, and that's the format the films were originally shown in. Unlike Western cinema, silent Japanese films were always accompanied by a live narrator who would act out the dialogue and describe the action. In this way, film became something of an extension of Japanese Bunraku theatre. Seeing this film without narration is not only un-authentic, but extremely taxing, since there are no intertitles at all, and a Wikipedia synopsis can only do so much to prepare you. I have no doubt that this is a moving experience seen in its intended way, but as it stands it's just a tantalizing glimpse into a lost art scene.
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